It looks like CAPE found the original proof. Now where’s that million-dollar prize?
Archive for the ‘Reading’ Category
Scott demonstrates that P != NP
Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008Safari 3.2’s Anti-Phishing
Friday, November 28th, 2008MacWorld deconstructs the anti-phishing features in Safari 3.2.
Bottom line for security & web developers: It’s Google’s database, they’ve been doing this for 3 years, only hashes go over the network, locally cached. It’s good stuff.
Bottom line for privacy-interested people: If you hit a suspicious hash prefix, you ask Google’s servers for the full hash. In theory this is enough for Google to do some analytics. Certainly it doesn’t directly reveal what URLs you are really visiting. Apple’s privacy policy does not discuss any sending of data to anyone but the site you visit (i.e. it is mute on this sort of feature). It further does not bind Google from misuse of anything they could collect. Mozilla’s privacy policy covers these bases.
Bottom line for anyone who has better things to worry about: It’s fine, leave the checkbox on, and if it ever warns you that you may be visiting a malicious website, stop and listen to it. You are probably not where you intend to be. Scott can explain.
Memory Consistency Papers
Sunday, January 27th, 2008I am getting very tired of reading papers about cache coherence and memory consistency. They all go something like this:
1. Introduction
We want to do everything out of order, because it’s faster.
2. Background
But if we do that, everything gets screwed up. Because it’s all out of order.
3. The Mumble-mumble Architecture
We do everything out of order. And if everything gets screwed up, we fix it.
4. Results
These graphs show how cool we are.
5. Smug Conclusion
Order is highly overrated anyway.
Classic Mac OS WordPress theme
Sunday, August 26th, 2007Classic Mac OS WordPress theme (via Digg)
This was a little before my time, but it’s nice to see the old Mac hasn’t been forgotten.
There are no Apple ][ themes. Maybe I’ll make one, just for kicks.
Requiring the Impossible
Sunday, August 26th, 2007This is only a “SHOULD” and not a “MUST” requirement because it has been proven to be impossible. [see the Halting Problem]
HTML 5 requirements for conformance checkers
Seam Carving for content-aware image resizing
Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007Seam Carving for content-aware image resizing
An interesting alternative to scaling (stupid) or cropping (stupid) when you need to make a big image small.
DPreview article via Ted’s del.icio.us.
Escape Velocity Intro Music
Monday, December 25th, 2006Repost from my main man Michael Kelly
For the past 5 or 6 years or so, I’ve been wondering what the super-cool intro music to Escape Velocity is. I’ve heard the music since in a commercial for a History Channel special on Hitler, and a commercial for Submarina. I even emailed Ambrosia once about it, but they said they’d forgotten what it was.
Tonight, on a whim, I searched for `”Escape Velocity” intro music’, and the first hit was a thread on the Ambrosia forums talking about the EV music on Good Morning America (video here). Later in the thread there’s a pointer to another thread that has links to a flash and mp3 version of the full song. They mentioned the site that has the song available for purchase, which I had found previously, but couldn’t decipher to the point that I could go buy it. (Apparently I was not alone.)
In any case, enjoy “Face of the Enemy”. I’m playing it over and over and backing it up repeatedly.
Warning Signs for Tomorrow
Saturday, October 21st, 2006If you were a scientist or engineer working on a technology capable of launching a Singularity, or alternately destroying most life on earth, what kind of warning sign would you put on the wall behind the lab bench?
Nailing Blu-Ray’s coffin shut
Tuesday, September 12th, 2006Toshiba Creates Three-Layered Disc (Gizmodo via Slashdot).
Backwards-compatibility! Today’s normal DVD players will play these hybrid discs just fine, and when you put the very same disc into an HD-DVD player, you get the next-gen HD content. You pay once for both next-gen HD content and graceful degradation to ubiquitous players. It’s no longer a binary choice between DVD and HD. The very best part: so few next-gen HD players and discs have shipped yet that this tech has a fighting chance of being in the second wave of products making it out to customers.
It’s not clear yet if next-gen HD will have as sharp an adoption curve as DVDs did. DVD’s advantages over VHS were fairly overwhelming: extra features, physical convenience, vastly better video quality, multichannel audio, multiple audio tracks, optional subtitles in multiple languages. Next-gen HD doesn’t bring much, just a little bit more of everything (resolution, channels, tracks, frames). DVD has a formidable installed base without compelling reason to upgrade, so the transition to next-gen HD may be fairly slow. In a slow transition, the most backwards-compatible format will win.
Blu-Ray’s only possible hope of responding is getting players in front of TV sets and burners into the lion’s share of computers, fast. PS3 is trying on the first count, but it may not be fast enough to get out there. At least its competitors, the 360 and Revolution, don’t come with HD-DVD players. As for computers, a brief survey of the two formats’ wikipedia articles seems to indicate Blu-ray has a slight headstart, though HD-DVD has more supporters in the PC industry.
As an aside, HD-DVD uses HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and friends for interactive programming and menus, while Blu-Ray uses Java. To me, that says everything that needs to be said about the two formats’ technical merits and likely trajectory of adoption by programmers.
iPod dropped in aircraft toilet causes small bomb scare
Sunday, August 27th, 2006Plus, amusing tie in with World of Warcraft. Hi, Cano.